Pattern of The Rail

six orchestral songs from Book of Travelers

PROGRAM NOTE

The morning after the 2016 presidential election, I packed a suitcase and boarded Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited bound for Chicago. Over the next thirteen days, I talked to dozens of strangers whom I met, primarily, in dining cars aboard the six trains that would carry me some 8,980 miles around the country. The songs on the resulting album, Book of Travelers, were intended as a kind of loose diary of that journey, and as a portrait of America at a time of profound national turbulence. Pattern of the Rail is an act of distillation and expansion: where the original album features ten songs for voice and piano, the orchestral realization herein has just six, organized into three movements with pairs of songs joined by transitional material. It's my hope that the essential qualities of the album, both its breadth and its intimacy, are more or less preserved in this suite

— Gabriel Kahane, 2019

LISTEN

I. Introduction – Baedeker – Model Trains

PURCHASE